Kushner as a Colonial Administrator

In a TV interview on June 2, on the news docuseries
“Axios” on the HBO channel, Jared Kushner opened up
regarding many issues, in which his ‘Deal of the
Century’ was a prime focus.

The major revelation made by
Kushner, President Donald Trump’s adviser and son-in-law,
was least surprising. Kushner believes that Palestinians are
not capable of governing themselves.

Not surprising,
because Kushner thinks he is capable of arranging the future
of the Palestinian people without the inclusion of the
Palestinian leadership. He has been pushing his so-called
‘Deal of the Century’ relentlessly, while including in
his various meets and conferences countries such as Poland,
Brazil and Croatia, but not Palestine.

Indeed, this is
what transpired at the Warsaw conference on ‘peace and
security’ in the Middle East. The same charade, also led
by Kushner, is expected to be rebooted in Bahrain on June 25.

Much has been
said about the subtle racism in Kushner’s words, reeking
with the stench of old colonial discourses where the natives
were seen as lesser, incapable of rational thinking beings
who needed the civilized ‘whites’ of the western
hemisphere to help them cope with their backwardness and
inherent incompetence.

Kushner, whose credentials are
merely based on his familial connections to Trump and family
friendship with Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu,
is now poised to be the colonial administrator of old,
making and enforcing the law while the hapless natives have
no other option but to either accommodate or receive their
due punishment.

This is not an exaggeration. In fact,
according to leaked information concerning
Kushner’s ‘Deal of the Century,’ and published in the
Israeli daily newspaper, ‘Israel Hayom’, if Palestinian
groups refuse to accept the US-Israeli diktats, “the US
will cancel all financial support to the Palestinians and
ensure that no country transfers funds to them.”

In the
HBO interview, Kushner offered the Palestinians a lifeline.
They could be considered capable of governing themselves
should they manage to achieve the following: “a fair
judicial system ... freedom of the press, freedom of
expression, tolerance for all religions."

The fact that
Palestine is an occupied country, subject in every possible
way to Israel’s military law, and that Israel has never
been held accountable for its 52-year occupation seems to be
of no relevance whatsoever, as far as Kushner is
concerned.

On the contrary, the subtext in all of what
Kushner has said in the interview is that Israel is the
antithesis to the unquestionable Palestinian failure. Unlike
Palestine, Israel needs to do little to demonstrate its
ability to be a worthy peace partner.

While the term ‘US
bias towards Israel’ is as old as the state of Israel
itself, what is hardly discussed is the specific of that
bias, the decidedly condescending, patronizing and, often,
racist view that US political classes have of Palestinians -
and all Arabs and Muslims, for that matter; and the utter
infatuation with Israel, which is often cited as a model for
democracy, judicial transparency and successful
‘anti-terror’ tactics.

According to Kushner a ‘fair
judicial system’ is a conditio sine qua non to
determine a country’s ability to govern itself. But is
Israeli judicial system “fair” and
“democratic”?

Israel does not have a single judicial
system, but two. This
duality has, in fact, defined Israeli courts from the
very inception of Israel in 1948. This de facto apartheid
system openly differentiates between Jews and Arabs, a fact
that is true in both civil and criminal law.

“Criminal
law is applied separately and unequally in the West Bank,
based on nationality alone (Israeli versus Palestinian),
inventively weaving its way around the contours of
international law in order to preserve and develop its
‘(illegal Jewish) settlement enterprise’,” Israeli
scholar, Emily Omer-Man, explained in her essay ‘Separate and
Unequal’.

In practice, Palestinians and Israelis who
commit the exact same crime will be judged according to two
different systems, with two different procedures: “The
settler will be processed according to the Israeli Penal
Code (while) the Palestinian will be processed according to
military order.”

This unfairness is constituent of a
massively unjust judicial apparatus that has defined the
Israeli legal system from the onset. Take the measure of administrative detention as an example.
Palestinians can be held without trial and without any
stated legal justification. Tens of thousands of
Palestinians have been subjected to this undemocratic
‘law’ and hundreds of them are currently held in Israeli
jails.

It is ironic that Kushner raised the issue of
freedom of the press, in particular, as Israel is being
derided for its dismal record in that regard. Israel has
reportedly committed 811 violations against Palestinian
journalists since the start of the ‘March of Return’ in
Gaza in March 2018. Two journalists - Yaser Murtaja and
Ahmed Abu Hussein - were killed and 155 were wounded by Israeli snipers.

Like the
imbalanced Israeli judicial system, targeting the press is
also a part of a protracted pattern. According to a press
release issued by the Palestinian Journalists Union last
May, Israel has killed 102 Palestinian journalists
since 1972.

The fact that Palestinian intellectuals, poets
and activists have been imprisoned for Facebook and other social media posts
should tell us volumes about the limits of Israel’s
freedom of press and expression.

It is also worth
mentioning that in June 2018, the Israeli Knesset voted for a bill that prohibits the
filming of Israeli soldiers as a way to mask their crimes
and shelter them from any future legal accountability.

As
for freedom of religion, despite its many shortcomings, the
Palestinian Authority hardly discriminates against religious
minorities. The same cannot be said about Israel.

Although
discrimination against non-Jews in Israel has been the
raison d’être of the very idea of Israel, the
Nation-State Law of July 2018 further cemented the superiority of the Jews and inferior
status of everyone else.

According to the new Basic Law,
Israel is “the national home of the Jewish people” only
and “the right to exercise national self-determination is
unique to the Jewish people.”

Palestinians do not need
to be lectured on how to meet Israeli and American
expectations, nor should they ever aspire to imitate the
undemocratic Israeli model. What they urgently need,
instead, is international solidarity to help them win the
fight against Israeli occupation, racism and
apartheid.

- Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and
editor of Palestine Chronicle. His latest book is The Last
Earth: A Palestinian Story (Pluto Press, 2018). He earned a
Ph.D. in Palestine Studies from the University of Exeter,
and is a former Non-Resident Scholar at Orfalea Center for
Global and International Studies,
UCSB.

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